Thursday, January 1, 2015

For my first project of the New Year, I decided to build a simple dipole antenna that could be used at the home QTH or at some portable location, such as a public park or a club Field Day. Although, I've built many dipole antennas, I felt a review of some basic antenna theory would "clear out some of the rust" incurred over the New Year's Eve celebration. I found this interesting video antenna tutorial from http://www.antenna-theory.com. The instruction was very clear and the basic forumlas were explained in plain language. This video would make good supplementary study material for those desiring an amateur radio license. In the end, I opted for a simple 40/15 meter inverted vee supported by a 33 foot/10.06 meters telescoping fiberglass mast. My feedline was some RG-8X I had stored in the garage of my vacation home in the Puna District of Hawaii Island. The antenna works very well on 40 and 15 meters. I have also fed the antenna with 450-ohm ladder line connected to a 4:1 balun, which used a short length of RG-8X coaxial cable to connect the system to my Drake MN-4. With the ladder line, I can access all amateur radio bands between 40 and 10 meters. The video also contains helpful hints on building shortened dipoles, half-wave dipoles, and dipoles longer than a half wavelength.
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Aloha es 73 de Russ (KH6JRM).